Facebook. Over 250 years old.
Tue, Mar 24, 09
If you go by Bibliodyssey‘s account of Stammbücher [Friend's Book] from the 1750s, Mark Zuckerberg may have not seen the last of the folks in line to sue Facebook for appropriation of the ‘original’ idea:
Stammbücher appear for the first time in the 16th and 17th centuries in the German- and Dutch-speaking areas of Europe, where it had become fashionable among graduating university students to have one’s personal bible signed by classmates and instructors. Soon inscriptions went beyond simple signatures to include reminiscences of common experiences, good wishes for the future, or a favorite passage from literature or poetry. Publishers foreseeing a lucrative market printed bibles with empty pages and soon also turned out small decorated books with only empty pages.
Eventually these albums were not only passed around at graduation but accompanied a student throughout his life, gathering entries from relatives, friends, and important acquaintances. Others also took up the custom, especially those who traveled as part of their training or social upbringing, such as aristocrats, tradesmen, military officers, poets, or musicians…
Daily question: Schooled early for safety in numbers?
Mon, Mar 23, 09
In Going With the Flow: Preschoolers Prefer Nondissenters as Informants, Harvard University researchers alarm us:
In two experiments, 3- and 4-year-olds were tested for their sensitivity to agreement and disagreement among informants. In pretest trials, they watched as three of four informants (Experiment 1) or two of three informants (Experiment 2) indicated the same referent for an unfamiliar label; the remaining informant was a lone dissenter who indicated a different referent. Asked for their own judgment, the preschoolers sided with the majority rather than the dissenter. In subsequent test trials, one member of the majority and the dissenter remained present and continued to provide conflicting information about the names of unfamiliar objects. Children remained mistrustful of the dissenter. They preferred to seek and endorse information from the informant who had belonged to the majority. [emp] The implications and scope of children’s early sensitivity to group consensus are discussed.
Can this possibly be unfamiliar to anyone who ever sat in a conference room?
What’s in a name: The other iPhone(s)
Fri, Mar 20, 09
Two years ago, the internets were abuzz over the trademark wars between Cisco and Apple regarding the name “iPhone.” Cisco claimed it owned the rights through its earlier acquisition of InfoGear. Apple wanted to use it for its upcoming blockbuster device. Cisco eventually sued Apple. They settled.
Until that moment, of course, 99.9999% of the world’s population had never even heard of the other iPhone. And since 2007? Cisco argued at the time that this would create confusion for consumers. Linksys claims its iPhone is “More than Talk!”:
Apparently, consumers have better sense, as this Google Trends chart shows 99.999% of the world’s population still hasn’t heard of the Linksys iPhone.
It turns out, however, there are other phones consumers can buy with the name “iPhone.” At this Chattanooga, TN based wholesaler, a search for “iPhone” returns 11 different products named “iPhone”:
Lesson?
It’s not what a name can do for your company, it’s what your company can do for a name.
iPhone OS 3: The moat strategy vs. features-fetishism
Thu, Mar 19, 09
The chattering class has a fetishistic indulgence with smartphones bordering on techno-porn:
Rumors were in full swing on the eve of Apple’s introduction of the iPhone OS 3.0 and virtually all of the speculation was about whether Apple would include one feature or another that some other phone already had.
Two days ago in iPhone OS 3.0: Refinement or a leap? we outlined the last two stages of the iPhone evolution from a device to a platform:
We anticipated that — despite all the rumors — iPhone OS 3.0 would not be a radical leap but a maturity play. And it was. Apple kept it simple:
While this garnered a collective yawn from the features-fetishists, barring a product introduction disaster, the iPhone OS 3.0 will do to iPhone-killers what it did do to iPod-killers half a decade ago. Apple consolidated its gains, marked its territory of 30M users+25K apps+800M downloads and built a very deep and wide moat around it. A moat so formidable that there’s not a single smartphone player capable of overcoming it.
Déjà vu all over again
At the start of his turnaround of Apple about a decade ago, Steve Jobs gave a keynote in which he went through, one-by-one, all the fears and concerns the industry, Wall Street and the media had about the viability of the beleaguered company. He then discussed what Apple was going to do to dispel them. Starting with the chaotic product line consolidation into a “product quadrant,” Digital Hub strategy and the iMac, Apple went about striking through all the real and perceived objections in the following few years. Instead of fear and denial, there was acceptance and execution.
Similarly, last year at the introduction of the iPhone 3G, Jobs went through the very same process by displaying all the objections to the original iPhone as a business tool and detailing how Apple accepted such reservations and eliminated them one-by-one in the upgrade.
Developers, developers, developers
During yesterday’s address to its developers, Apple was following the same game plan of acceptance and execution with two simple objectives: (1) eliminate as many perceived and real reservations iPhone customers may have in choosing the iPhone, and (2) provide a wide range of incentives to what’s already the most impressive mobile developer ecosystem to prevent any defections to rival platforms.
The iPhone is not the cheapest, the most widely distributed or the most open device in the market. Why should developers prefer it then? Apple offered a few thematic reasons:
These and a thousand other new APIs are wrapped inside what’s inarguably the most sophisticated mobile SDK in the industry. Every one of these new APIs is designed to both help developers create new type of applications and open up avenues of new revenue at the 70/30 split. Take just one example where developers got device-control API access to the 30-pin port (which earlier created a multi-billion dollar ecosystem for the iPod):
Show me the money
The “Accessories” APIs alone represents concrete opportunities for thousands of new applications most of which we likely haven’t seen yet on any existing platform, translating into hundreds of millions of app downloads over the next few years, and thus growing the App Store into a multi-billion dollar revenue source 70% of which will go directly to developers.
While analysts and competitors were busy making feature-level comparisons (of mostly hardware), Apple consolidated its platform lead and laid the foundations of a new growth engine the likes of which the mobile industry has neither yet seen nor fully comprehends.
No developers, no users
Since developers go where the users are, Apple also methodically eliminated the vast majority of iPhone’s “missing” features: copy and paste, landscape text entry, global search, notifications, MMS, voice memos, new calendar format, Notes sync, stereo Bluetooth support, extended parental controls, browser auto-fill and anti-phishing… pretty much anything else that may have given potential customers a pause previously. Of course, we haven’t been shown all the new APIs and we still don’t know what the upcoming iPhone hardware is capable of.
Forest. Trees.
One might wonder at this point if there’s ever a way to fully satisfy the features-fetishists. Video recording/conferencing, voice control, background processing and a host of other capabilities may have to wait for the next iPhone version, when users can perhaps better enjoy the fruits of faster processors, 4G speed and Apple’s PA-Semi acquisition. Apple’s not in the business of feature-complete perfection or geek satisfaction. It’s merely seeking meaningful profit maximization as a business and inspiring transformation of industries it touches as a culture.
By the end of 2009, we expect the virtuous cycle to kick in and the moat strategy to reveal just how difficult it will be to compete against Apple’s touch platform, thereby ushering in consolidation in the rest of the smartphone industry.
Noted: “Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners”
Tue, Mar 17, 09
Via Freedom to Tinker:
From banknotes to contracts, authenticating printed documents has been a longstanding challenge. Here’s what the surface of paper looks like under a microscope:
Now Princeton University security expert Ed Felten and other researchers claim they have devised a way to generate a 3D “fingerprint” of any piece paper via an ordinary scanner, in a study (PDF) to be published in May:
This paper presents a novel technique for authenticating physical documents based on random, naturally occurring imperfections in paper texture. We introduce a new method for measuring the three-dimensional surface of a page using only a commodity scanner and without modifying the document in any way. From this physical feature, we generate a concise fingerprint that uniquely identifies the document. Our technique is secure against counterfeiting and robust to harsh handling; it can be used even before any content is printed on a page. It has a wide range of applications, including detecting forged currency and tickets, authenticating passports, and halting counterfeit goods. Document identification could also be applied maliciously to de-anonymize printed surveys and to compromise the secrecy of paper ballots.
So what’s the significance of this approach?
Our work shows that ordinary pieces of paper can be fingerprinted and later identified using commodity desktop scanners. The technique we developed functions like a “biometric” for paper and allows original documents to be securely and reliably distinguished from copies or forgeries.
And how successful can it be?
The security of our methods against forgery, in cases where the adversary has full access to information, will depend ultimately on a race between the resolution of the printers that can create patterns on a page, and the resolution of the scanners that can observe patterns.
The ideal solution, of course, would be an iPhone with a powerful enough lens and light source coupled with an app to do the verification anywhere.
